TAG

Touch Art Gallery

Touch Art Gallery (TAG) is a Windows 8/8.1 Metro Application developed for museums for viewing large, digitized artworks in a novel fashion. It uses an open-source version of Microsoft's Deep Zoom technology to dynamically load portions of images at different resolutions, allowing a user to see a 540 foot long panorama at once, or the brushstrokes on the ocean in one square inch of the piece. Deep Zoom can handle images measuring billions of pixels, all at unprecedented speeds.

The purpose of TAG is to leverage the power of modern web technology to enhance the research and learning process. TAG is meant to be used by museums to display large portions of their collections at a time. TAG is a touch-first system, meant to run on any touch device ranging from the Microsoft Surface tablet to an 82" touchscreen. This allows casual museum-goers to interact with artworks closer than ever before and allows them to, while at home, browse the intricate collections of museums. With TAG, users are no longer passive viewers, but active participants in the exploratory process. By digitizing their collections, museums are able to showcase enormous, fragile, or otherwise undisplayable pieces to everyone.

TAG may be obtained from the Microsoft Windows Store. A draft of the TAG User Guide is available for download. (Note - if your browser does not display the User Guide, right click on the link to download the file for local viewing)